Zenebe BASHAW - codesria

freedom to express and publish their opinions-about matters of general
interest (1974: 49)
.
Non-European process of state formation, specifically in Africa, is quite different both in its
nature and the states that came into existence. Whilst there were extensive changes in
territorial configuration during state formation in Europe, which occurred analogues to the
process of “natural selection”, most African countries showed little, if not any, external
territorial changes. A closer look at the maps of Europe and Africa, for example, during the
respective process of state formation is indicative of more extensive territorial changes in the
former than the almost territorial continuity in the latter. The major changes in Africa were
internal in the course of the successive states’ attempt to claim control over agents of the
public sphere mainly ethno-linguistic groups and regional/local leaders, while the externality
of the territories were arbitrary determined by the colonial powers. It was an attempt to
configure and reconstitute the internal dynamics of the “container” rather than to challenge
the space that bounded the states. State formation did not place the “guns” (war), the “money”
(formation of bureaucratic structures and capacities to mobilize people and resources) and the
“lawyers” (nation-building and relationships with agents of the public sphere) for the
emergence of territorial states as durable organization (see Schwartz, 2000: 20; also Ertman,
1997: 6). The first two, when complemented by the last, become, to use John Brewer’s (1988)
words, “the sinews of power”.
The manners that forces of the public sphere posed their resistance to the dominant and often
dictatorial elites in Africa were also different from the open engagement and dialogue for
changes and increased participation in Europe. Seen from broader theoretical-cum-empirical
studies, there have been various lines of research on alienation, political trust, modes of
participation, political efficacy and the like that are employed to measure political legitimacy
of the state vis-à-vis agents of the public sphere (Weatherford, 1992: 149). Similar to the
challenge of how one understands the hidden aspects of power as posited by the second
dimension of power (Lukes, 1974; Gaventa, 1980), an examination of the acceptability of a
state’s institutions by forces of the public sphere in weak Third World states, or what Michael
Schatzberg calls its “thinkability” (2001: 1), is faced with the problem of assessing the
attitudes of actors of the public sphere towards political authority. Its better understanding
therefore requires looking at the socio-cultural frames of opposition of agents of the public
sphere (Geertz, 1973; Schetzberg, 2001). Social-cultural frames of opposition mainly
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